"Well, it's not quite a mop and it's not quite a puppet… but man (laughs). So to answer your question, I don't know." – Homer Simpson, "A Fish Called Selma"

Marvel Wiki

Since I’m in the process of jumping back on the comic book bandwagon, I’ve been spended a good deal of time on the official sites for most of the comic book publishers – mostly DC & Marvel.

Marvel has just relaunched their site to incorporate a Wiki for their Marvel Universe section. Registered users can add updates, links and information (or edit others) to enhance the biographies of Marvel entities.

Right now the Heroes and Teams sections are being built up, but the Villain section is notably barren. Hopefully as more folks come to the new site and register, more and better information will appear.

Two things are working against Marvel, though:

Editorial oversight

Unlike most Wikis, edits are not instantaneous for users and must be sent to an Administrator. Also, anonymous contributions are not allowed.

If Wikipedia can grow and thrive while still allowing anonymous contributions and eschewing a centralized editor, so can Marvel.

A wiki for all things Marvel (and DC) already exists. Why not ask those members to contribute or edit the new Marvel.com wiki.

Better yet, negotiate for the content to pre-populate the new site.

I’m just bummed that my two, minor contributions haven’t made it to the site yet. One was a grammatical change to the Quasar page (substituting “than” for “then”) and one was creating internal links to existing pages from the Sub-Mariner page.

Geeky, I know, but Marvel is offering Hero Points – they’re version of Karma or power – as both a reward and a measure of your ability to directly edit pages and the contributions of others.

Ideally, I suppose, they would have enough users who’ve reached a certain status level that the site could be run by these editors and not someone corporate. I’m all for that idea, if Marvel gets enough knowledgable, active users. *Fingers crossed*

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One thought on “Marvel Wiki”

I’ll note that neither PAD’s nor Ellis’s blog are formally associated with DC. Even with exclusive contracts, it would be hard to tie a creator to a company blog site like that. Providing links to their blogs — that might be interesting (though possibly controversial, given for example both PAD and Ellis’ tendencies to speak their minds on stuff).

All the rest of your thoughts — spot on. Why have a proactively moderated Wiki? Why not use existing resources? It’s all about, sadly, control.